Most colleagues know Tim Cao as the analytics guy. The one building dashboards and automating data systems at POET’s Wichita office. What they don’t expect is that he once spent his childhood under Broadway lights, performing in major musicals.
He doesn’t usually lead with that part.
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Family and friends sometimes give him a hard time about withholding his fascinating origin story. “I don’t share it when I first meet people, but then conversations start to brew,” Cao said. “They talk about football, they talk about sports, and then I say I used to dance. And you can just see their brains starting to go, ‘Whoa, what?’”
Cao started in dance classes at three years old alongside his sister, partly due to the advice of a doctor who said music would help his hearing (it did) and partly due to his mother’s own childhood dream. After appearing in The King and I in Wichita, the dream took hold of Cao. Beginning in third grade, his mother would take him for auditions in Hollywood every summer for a couple of weeks. He got a few gigs, but nothing major.
They headed to New York, where he landed a big role in the musical Oliver as the Artful Dodger. “My mom was sending me to auditions while we were there, trying to pursue a dream and make it as cost-effective as possible,” he recalled. They were back in Wichita when they got a call back for a second audition, returning to New York with three days’ worth of clothes. He wouldn’t go home for two years.
Around 12 at the time, he appeared in an average of 10 performances a week in Matilda the Musical, kept up with schoolwork on his laptop, and started ballet lessons. Then he aged out of the part at 14 when his voice began to change — and it was time to go home.
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Back in Wichita, “I remember being so unhappy. I just wanted to dance, and my mom could tell.” The closest similar training to New York was in Kansas City. “My mom would drive me every weekend. Three hours there, three hours back. I remember going into the Love’s gas station, putting on my tights, my white shirt, my ballet socks, and then finishing the last 30 minutes of the drive.”
He soon joined the Kansas City Ballet daytime program and, throughout his high school years, would dance all day, do online classes, and dance at night. “I thought to myself, ‘If I could make this a career, I’d really like to.’”
After high school, he started in the Kansas City Ballet traineeship program and was ready to advance, he said. “I was starting to get paid more — starting to get paid at all — but then Covid hit. I knew I had to fit college in somehow, but I didn’t want to be taking classes from my living room. So I completely switched gears.”
Cao enrolled at Wichita State University in economics, where a professor spotted his interest, which led to an accelerated program with a focus on business analytics and a master’s degree. “I really like business analytics, and I can’t dance forever,” he explained. “Normally, guys who dance retire at about 30.” Nonetheless, he continued to dance after college classes.
Recalling his job search, he laughed, “It’s crazy how different theater resumes are compared to corporate resumes.” Cao landed an internship at POET’s Wichita office that has transitioned to a full-time job. He says it reminds him of his days in New York and Kansas City, where he would sit down and get lost working at the computer. Now he crafts data solutions, such as a system to automate what had been hand-entered railcar data for tracking and forecasting.
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“Tim Cao is a standout contributor to our BSA (business support analytics) team — analytically sharp, energetic, and always willing to share his expertise. He’s exactly the kind of person who makes a team stronger,” said Pauline Alcocer, Cao’s supervisor.
Although the two worlds — dance and business — are incredibly different, Cao sees synergies. “They are two separate worlds,” he said. “But I think my work ethic is a strength. A willingness to think outside the box stems from being in the arts. I notice when I build dashboards, they’re more colorful. I’m thinking how does this flow, because in dance we think of being organic with our movements.”
Now working full-time, Cao is also following another family influence: real estate. He recently bought and began renovating a house. But, ballet isn’t totally off his radar. Last December, with just two weeks’ notice, he replaced an injured dancer in The Nutcracker at the Wichita Ballet.
And he realized he missed it.
So he’s back in the studio, getting back into shape and planning to audition once again. Because even when life takes an unexpected turn from Broadway to business analytics, some passions never really leave the stage.
